Don Graham On WaPo Sale: We Wanted The Paper To Succeed

Don Graham, Chairman and CEO of The Washington Post Co., wrote a letter to Washington Post employees Monday explaining why he decided to sell the flagship paper that has been in his family for four generations to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos.

"Our revenues had declined seven years in a row. We had innovated and to my critical eye our innovations had been quite successful in audience and in quality, but they hadn’t made up for the revenue decline," he wrote. "Our answer had to be cost cuts and we knew there was a limit to that. We were certain the paper would survive under our ownership, but we wanted it to do more than that. We wanted it to succeed."